"Listen More, Talk Less," by Liane Strauss

Listen more, talk less

Liane Strauss That was the advice she wanted to give to the daughter of her friend, she said It’s the advice I wish someone had given me at that age, the advice I would give myself if I could go back and— And listen, I couldn’t resist It was the day after tax day and the insistent wind that had stormed the town, howling and whistling And tormenting the windows up and down the avenues like the pack of wolves bedeviling the caribou on Our Planet I had watched that episode with the children before bed and I didn’t know whether that was what woke them Or the storm, louder than the avalanching crashes of the spears of ice eighty stories high and the stacks of snow So dense and white they were blue and looked like meringues just when they get that creamy sheen and you’re supposed to stop beating them

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L I S T E N MOR E , TA L K L E S S

Sheering off the heights all night, roiling the waters off of Greenland And this morning Notre Dame like the Twin Towers on the cover of all the papers But there was no switching her off her track, not a chance of derailing her She blinked once, like an owl thinking about a mouse And barreled on, past the models of commuters artfully positioned on all the local platforms Think of all the trouble I could save her!

But all I could think of were the parents going to jail for sending their children to the ivy leagues (why did that make me think of the gulag) And who was going to save them And the krill that live off the algae that lives in the ice And how food chains are a kind of chain, but one that shouldn’t be broken While there are others that are more like Blake’s manacles, or chain reactions, nuclear, and harder to break Which reminded me of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” doomed, as Tennyson understood, from the beginning

L I A N E S T R AU S S

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All the endless analysis is good, as you like to say, but where does it get you I wanted to say something when I saw her over spring break, she was saying I was half-listening, half-wondering whether it was something to do with the intersection of linguistics and biology The way the shape of our words fails to fit with the shape of our ears, perhaps, that makes us incapable of hearing Anything said directly, as the crow flies An expression which means we know it’s impossible Or the way track is laid, along parallel lines And whether they used to fit better, like maybe when we spoke Sumerian And there’s been some kind of degradation alongside the evolution that so many people assume is progress Or whether it’s just communication’s natural proclivity toward all forms of deception, the way we hedge our emotional but not just our emotional bets The way some forms of survival are flatly self-destructive And whether humans are the only ones for whom that is true, and if only we were better at making use of it

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L I S T E N MOR E , TA L K L E S S

I keep remembering the time my late husband threw the Scrabble board across the bedroom, she was saying How for weeks after I kept coming across those unlikely tiles in the craziest of places A Q deep in a corner in the pocket of my bathrobe, an E nestled on the edge of the windowsill There was even a poor little W that had landed somehow in the dust and folds of the curtains I only found years later, on the phone with my mother Telling me again how nothing I ever did surprised her